The Maya entertained an excessive and constant fear of death, many of their religious practices having no other end in view than that of warding off the dread visitor. After death there followed a prolonged period of sadness in the bereaved family, the days being given over to fasting, and the more restrained indulgence in grief, and the nights to dolorous cries and lamentations, most pitiful to hear. Among the common people the dead were wrapped in shrouds; their mouths were filled with ground corn and bits of worked stone so that they should not lack for food and money in the life to come. The Maya buried their dead inside the houses[12] or behind them, putting into the tomb idols, and objects indicating the profession of the deceased--if a priest, some of his sacred books; if a seer, some of his divinatory paraphernalia. A house was commonly abandoned after a death therein, unless enough remained in the household to dispel the fear which always followed such an occurrence. In the higher walks of life the mortuary customs were more elaborate. The bodies of chiefs and others of high estate were burned and their ashes placed in large pottery vessels. These were buried in the ground and temples erected over them.[13] When the deceased {12} was of very high rank the pottery sarcophagus took the form of a human statue. A variant of the above procedure was to burn only a part of the body, inclosing the ashes in the hollow head of a wooden statue, and sealing them in with a piece of skin taken from the back of the dead man's skull. The rest of the body was buried. Such statues were jealously preserved among the figures of the gods, being held in deep veneration. The lords of Mayapan had still another mortuary practice. After death the head was severed from the body and cooked in order to remove all flesh. It was then sawed in half from side to side, care being taken to preserve the jaw, nose, eyes, and forehead in one piece. Upon this as a form the features of the dead man were filled in with a kind of a gum. Such was their extraordinary skill in this peculiar work that the finished mask is said to have appeared exactly like the countenance in life. The carefully prepared faces, together with the statues containing the ashes of the dead, were deposited with their idols. Every feast day meats were set before them so they should lack for nothing in that other world whither they had gone.